Rough Likeness: Essays

by Lia Purpura

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Also by Lia Purpura

  Acknowledgments

  On Coming Back as a Buzzard

  The Lustres

  “Poetry Is a Satisfying of the Desire for Resemblance” (Theme & Variations)

  Against “Gunmetal”

  Street Scene

  Being of Two Minds

  “Try Our Delicious Pizza”

  Augury

  There Are Things Awry Here

  Jump

  Gray

  Advice

  On Luxury

  Remembering

  On Tools

  Shit’s Beautiful

  Memo Re: Beach Glass

  Two Experiments & a Coda

  Street Experiment

  Silence Experiment

  Coda

  NOTES

  Copyright Page

  For Jed and Joseph

  Also by Lia Purpura

  King Baby (poems)

  On Looking (essays)

  Stone Sky Lifting (poems)

  Increase (essays)

  Poems of Grzegorz Musial (translations)

  The Brighter the Veil (poems)

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’d like to thank the editors of the following magazines in which these essays first appeared, sometimes in slightly different form:Agni: “Against ‘Gunmetal’”; “Being of Two Minds”; “The Lustres”; “Memo Re: Beach Glass”; “Two Experiments & a Coda”

  Arts & Letters: “‘Try Our Delicious Pizza’”

  Black Warrior Review: “‘Poetry Is a Satisfying of the Desire for Resemblance’ (Theme & Variations)”

  Crazyhorse: “Street Scene”

  Ecotone: “On Tools”

  Iowa Review: “Augury”; “Jump”

  Ninth Letter: “Remembering”

  Orion: “On Coming Back as a Buzzard”; “There Are Things Awry Here”

  Seattle Review: “Advice”

  Sonora Review: “On Luxury”

  Southern Review: “Gray”

  “There Are Things Awry Here” was reprinted in Best American Essays, 2011; “On Coming Back as a Buzzard” and “Two Experiments & a Coda” were reprinted in The Pushcart Anthology XXXV 2011 and XXXIV 2010. “The Lustres” and “Remembering” were named “Notable Essays” in Best American Essays 2008 and 2009.

  I am deeply grateful to Jed Gaylin, Maddalena Purpura, and Kent Meyers for advice of the revelatory variety, and for the lavish attention they’ve given to my work; to Dan Corrigan for fine tracking skills; Alan Kolc, for artistry; Bill Pierce and Hilarie Gaylin for pinch hitting; and to Loyola University’s Center for Humanities for generous summer study grants. And to Sarah Gorham, whose keen eye, light touch, and sustaining faith are rare and wondrous gifts. Daily, I know how lucky I am to have found her.

  On Coming Back as a Buzzard

  I know, coming back as a crow is a lot more attractive. If crows and buzzards do the same rough job—picking, tearing and cleaning up—who wouldn’t rather return as a shiny blue crow with a mind for locks and puzzles. A strong voice, and poem-struck. Sleek, familial, omen-bearing. Full of mourning and ardor and talk. Buzzards are nothing like this, but something other, complicated by strangeness and ugliness. They intensify my thinking. They look prehistoric, pieced together, concerned. I might simply say I feel closer to them—always have—and proceed. Because, really, as I turn it over, the problem I’m working on here, coming back as a buzzard, has not so much to do with buzzards after all.

  A buzzard is expected at the table. The rush would be over by the time I got there and I, my lateness sanctioned, might rightfully slip in. I wouldn’t saunter, nor would I blow in dramatically—flounce, as my grandmother would say. The road would be the dinner table (just as the dinner table with its veering discussions, is always a road somewhere) and others’ distraction would resolve—well, I would resolve it—into a clean plate.

  I would be missed if I were not there. Not at first, not in the frenzy, but later.

  Without me, no outlines, no profiles come clear. The very idea of scaffolding is diminished.

  “The smaller scraps are tastier” would have no defender. “Close to the bone” would fall out of use as a measure of sharply felt truth.

  Without a chance to walk away from abundance, thus proving their wealth, none of the first eaters would be content with their portion. I make their bestowing upon the least of us possible.

  With me around, mishaps—side of the highway, over a cliff, more slowly dispensed by poison—do not have to be turned to a higher purpose. I step in. I make use of.

  And here, I’m whittling away at the problem.

  As a buzzard, I’d know the end of a thing is precisely not that. Things go on, in their way. My presence making the end a beginning, reinterpreting the idea of abundance, allowing for the ever-giving nature of Nature—I’d know these not as religious thoughts. It’s that, apportioned rightly, there’s always enough, more than enough. “Nothing but gifts on this poor, poor earth” says Milosz, who understood perfectly the resemblance between dissolve and increase. Rain scours and sun burns away excesses of form. And rain also seeds, and sun urges forth fuses of green.

  I’d love best the movement of stages and increments, to repeat “this bank and shoal of time” while below me banks and shoals of a body went on welling/receding, rising and dropping. I’d be perched on a wire, waiting, ticking off not the meat reducing, but how what’s left, like a dune, shifts and reconstitutes. Yes, it looks like I hover, and the hovering, I know, suggests a discomfiting eagerness. Malevolence. Why is that? I haven’t killed a thing. If the waiting seems untoward, it may be confirming something too real, too true: all the parts that slip from sight, can’t be easily had, collapse in on themselves and require digging, all the parts that promise small, intense bursts of sweetness unnerve us—while the easily abundant, the spans, the expanses (thick haunch, round belly and shoulder), all that lifts easily to another’s lips and retains its form till the end—seems pure. Right and deserved. Proper and lawful. Thus butchers have their neat diagrams. One knows to call for chop, loin, shank, rump.

  I’d get to be one, who, when passed the plate, seeks first the succulent eye. This would mark me: foreigner. Stubborn lover of scraps and dark meat. Base. Trained on want and come to love piecemeal offerings—the shreds and overlooked tendernesses too small for a meal, but carefully, singularly gathered—like brief moments that burst: isolate beams of sun in truck fumes, underside of wrist against wrist, sudden cool from a sewer grate rising. I incline toward the tucked and folded parts—it’s that the old country can’t be bred out—the internals with names that lack correspondence, the sweetbreads and umbles, bungs, hoods, and liver-and-lights. If the road is a plate, then the outskirts of fields and settlements where piles are heaped are plates, too. And the gullies, the ditches, the alleys—all plates. I’d get to reorder your thoughts about troves, to prove the spilled and shoveled-aside to be treasure. To reconfer notions of milk and honey, and how to approach the unbidden.

  I resemble, as I suppose we all do, the things I consume: bent to those raw flaps of meat, red, torn, cast aside, my head also looks like a leftover thing, chewed. I have my ways of avoiding attention: vomit to turn away predators. Shit, like the elegant stork, on my legs to cool off, to disinfect the swarming microbes I tread daily. I am gentle. And cautious. I ride the thermals and flap very little (conserve, conserve) and locate food by smell. I’m a black V in air. A group of us on the ground is a venue. In the air we’re a kettle.

  I reuse even the language.

  A simple word, aftermath, structures my day. Sometimes I think epic—doesn’t everyone apply to their journey a story
? Then flyblown, feculent, scavenge come—how it must seem to others—and the frame of my story’s reduced. Things are made daily again. The first eaters are furiously driven—by hunger, and brute need releasing trap doors in the brain. Such push and ambition! I hold things in pantry spots in my body and take out and eat what I’ve saved when I need it and so am never furious. On my plate, choice reduces. I take what I come upon, and the work of a breeze cools the bowl’s steaming contents. There’s a beauty in this singularity: consider bringing to each occasion your one perfect bowl, one neat fork/spoon/knife set. That when the chance comes, you’re given to draw the tine-curves between lips, pull, lick, tap clean the spoon’s curvature—and for these sensations, there’s ample time. Time pinned open, like the core of long summer afternoon.

  Am I happy? Yes, in momentary ways. Which I think is a good way to feel about things that come when they will, and not when you will them. While I’m waiting, I get to be with the light as it shifts off the wet phone wire, catches low sun, holds, pearls and unpearls drops of water. If I bounce just a little, they shiver and fall, and my weight calls more pearls to me. There’s light over the blood-matted rib-fur, and higher up, translucing on the still-unripped ear of the fox. Light through drops of fresh resin on pine limbs, light on ditchwater neverminding the murk. I get fixed by spoors of light, silver shine on silks and tassels, light choosing the lowliest, palest blue gristle for lavishing. I wait at a height and from afar, up here on the telephone wire, with what looks like a hunch-shouldered burden. Below, the red coils of spilled guts gather dust on ground. Such a red and its steam in the cold gets to be shock—and riches. Any red interruption on asphalt, on hillside, at dune’s edge—shock, and not a strewn thing, not waste. Not a mess. Plump entrails crusting with sage and dirt tighten in sun: piercing that is an under-sung moment, filled with a tender resistance, a sweetness, slick curves and tangles to dip into, tear, stretch, snap, and swallow.

  The problem with coming back as a buzzard is the notion of coming back.

  I can’t believe in the coming-back.

  Sure I play the dinnertime game, everyone identifying their animal-soul, the one they choose to reveal their best nature, the one, when the time comes, they hope fate will award them: strong eagle! smart dolphin! joyful golden retriever! But there’s the issue of where I’d have to go first, in order to make a return. And the idea of things I did or failed to do in a lifetime fixing the terms of my return—and the keeping of records, and just who’s totting it up. As soon as I imagine returning anew (brave stallion-reward, dung-beetle reproach) I lose heart. It’s too easy.

  Anyway, I already think like a buzzard.

  The times I forget my child, most powerfully marked by the moments that follow, in which I abruptly remember him again, with sharp breath, disturbed at the oversight—those times are evidence enough of my fall into reverie, into the all that is set, unbidden, before me: inclinations gone to full folds, bone-shaded hollows, easings and slouchings, taut ridges, matched dips, cupped small of the back, back of the neck, the ever-giving body—yes, I take what’s set before me. So much feels hosted—and fleet. I chew a little koan: all things go/always more where that came from.

  I already know the buzzard.

  That the world calls me to hissing and grunting, that I am given a nose for decay’s weird sweetness, that I am arranged in a broken-winged pose to dry feathers and bake off mites in the sun, that I love the wait, that I have my turn, that no one wants my job so I go on being needed—I have my human equivalences for these.

  The Lustres

  I am, I admit, daunted here. Set upon by impossibility, which is both my subject and predicament. My method, then, will be the standard proceeding-in-the-face-of variety. I’ll call some point “beginning” and begin. This state, right now, is coiled up like a fiddlehead fern, so bright-green, fresh, lemony, cochlear I cannot bring myself to pick/wash/steam it just yet. This moment, folded into itself, is resting so tenderly I find it hard to get going—in just the same way I cannot bring myself to make a fist with one hand while touching the yielding velvet of an earlobe with the other. Or to bite down hard on pearled barley or luminous beads of tapioca. At the farmers’ market, it’s the shiver of apricots, their thinnest bitter-honey skin, the speed at which the over-softness will set in, right then, right that minute if mishandled.

  I have ways to manage and even enjoy the subacute rise in anxiety. The adjustments, once the words are set in motion, the circling, the backtracking, the proper dimming of lights save me.

  I call upon the partial.

  It is the partial I believe in, twilit and salvaged as any childhood god. Scraps and spots, moments and lustres passing and glimpsed sidelong.

  I remind myself that starting anticipates a geography. A moment seeks a shape and claims here (bedroom window, perfume bottle) as its wobbly launch. And it is somewhere in here that the unsayable is lodged. How to speak of it is my problem, my subject, rolled between thumb and index finger like a bead of wool. I worry it and it soothes. Very early, I embarked on this task in its simplest form, by unspooling words: I’d hold one in my mouth and repeat it over and over, letting incantation mow down sense, so the phonemes marked a spot, trampled the ground, lit a fire and purified themselves into rote, risen things. I’d let a single, drossy word dissolve on my tongue, little plosives (pepper), or breathy sibilants (citizen) until a brief pulp of sustenance formed, a slurry juice where a word once was, and from there I could start building back meaning.

  Of course I believe, still, that words harbor side streets with surprise spills of bougainvillea come upon, low stone walls and chickens whitening briefly the chinks between stones. Stiff cough and broom-swipe in a courtyard, low easy talk, internal doors slamming. I give no casual access to my city here, but think it will—I hope this impulse to speak of it will—lift lightly and settle over you, offer some sensibility, some original atmosphere. I want some lisp, a recognizable accent to surface, to catch and welcome you in.

  Starting, I hoard, palm, pocket the impulse. Starting, I think: back it up, slow it down. Delay with just a little more history here.

  Early on I knew. I’d suspected for some time, but then: in one of my father’s art books, there was Magritte’s curvy pipe, titled “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” And his four-paneled painting in which a horse is called “door,” a clock is “wind,” a pitcher “bird,” and a valise (surprise!) is exactly—or inexactly now—“valise.” So objects were loosely affixed to their names, and language a game we all agreed to play! This suggestion did not make me queasy; I was not chilled or moved to anger, as if toward an imposter. I was not disillusioned. I was a child. And to the word as stand-in I gave my pity and my allegiance. I extended latitude. I granted amnesty. I was grateful to the word for trying. So here:

  I called it Vienna, but it wasn’t Vienna-the-city. I did not know that Vienna. My grandmother and great aunt were from Augsburg, and Vienna was far, nearly 300 miles, and there were no stories about it. I could assume I’d encountered Vienna in books and arranged associations from what I’d read. But that would be inaccurate. I read no books about Vienna. (I was busy for a long time with a perfectly square little book about kids in Japan, their Children’s Day, their Flower Festival. I was busy imagining my feet in wooden sandals and my waist cinched tight in a red silk kimono; the rice-powder makeup I’d be allowed to wear. The gift of an orange I’d eat with reverence. I’d have a gray kitten. And a box kite that obeyed.) I could construct other accountings of the word’s first appearance, but here, now, I’m ready. It’s that I took the word—Vienna—and matched it up with what I knew of distance and its complications. I applied Vienna to an elsewhere. It’s one of the ways I taught myself that elsewhere has a shape—and that one might be, if alert, if not grabby, shone upon by its mystery.

  And now that I’m in it, now that I’m committed, here are some Viennese offerings: the Long Island Railroad tracks that ran behind my Aunt Pasq’s house, just beyond her small grape arbor trus
sed to the poles of the clothesline. Across the street, lying in bed at night in my grandmother’s house, I practiced gauging the arrival of trains by the pitch of their hollow whistles sounding three towns, two towns, then one away. The profound rattle started first in the walls, rose into the vases and cups of nighttime water, and by the time it reached my chest and hummed there, it was gone.

  In the moments just after the trains flew past, it was Vienna in the room.

  And in the morning, pairing that rush with the feel of an ampoule breaking and spreading its pinks and golds, it was a new Vienna, a Vienna again and again to enter, through the door of noise (trains every ten minutes) or the buttery window, south-facing, and catching and holding the fresh-poured light.

  More?

  In truth, I have a ready list:

  I learned the word bower for an intimacy I trace to a scene atop an enameled pillbox, given to me by Madame Lulu, visiting from South Africa. She ran an orphanage for Jewish refugees, and we knew the grown-up orphan who was my parents’ friend, David. On the pillbox, in blue and white, a seated peasant girl and standing peasant boy inclined together in a tondo of love amid hills and a far-off, blurry castle. Their heads touched, their eyes met on the empty basket in her lap and the bouquet in his hand hung just a wisp, a breath of white away from it. Sometimes I’d take a break from the scene and flick the golden lips of the clasp apart, open the box, and touch my tongue to the fine powder left there by Madame’s pills—tiny saccharine tablets for her tea—then snap the box shut and ride the wisp all the way down to the girl’s lap, and fast up to the distant castle.